Transferring disability experience to design practice

Through their bodily interaction with the built environment, disabled people can detect obstacles and appreciate spatial qualities architects and other designers may not be attuned to. To some extent, disabled people can thus be considered as connoisseurs: they are able to differentiate and perceive variables in their body or the surrounding world that are meaningless to others. In architectural practice, however, disability experience is rarely considered a valuable source for design: building codes consider accessibility of buildings as something taken care of by professional experts, instead of something people are attached or exposed to, leaving disabled people as seemingly incapable of joining the dialogue because they are supposedly no experts in the field. This paper reports on a field experiment set up to explore whether and how disabled people's bodily experience of space can be shared and transferred to inform architects' design practice. Five buildings and one building site were visited by one or more teams, each composed of a disabled person and two architecture students (31 disabled people and 47 students in total). During these visits, a particular dialogue developed which is embodied in nature and unfolds in situ. Students reported the insights gained during this dialogue in a way that is non-normative-it informs designers about how disabled people experience the building/site rather than prescribing how to (re)design it-and narrative-it respects the intricate relatedness of things in how people experience space. The paper documents how this approach enables latent understandings to develop into alternative and richer appreciations of a situation, by 'giving voice' to people who are rarely heard in design practice, cultivating various perspectives on a building/site and encouraging a reflexive stance by those involved. Through these local interactions and involvement, professional prejudice is overcome and transformed into empathic concern that could inform future design.